


i was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

by galactic_cam



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Adorable Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt Tony Stark, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I know i shouldn't have written this, I'm Sorry, Not Beta Read, Not Happy, Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Sorry Not Sorry, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, we die like Tony stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26228749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galactic_cam/pseuds/galactic_cam
Summary: Tony Stark mourns for the son that wasn't his, and Peter Parker mourns the father who never claimed him.Or: Tony Stark mourned Peter Parker, and Peter Parker does the same.They were getting used to being loved by each other.
Relationships: Happy Hogan & Peter Parker, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	1. the day bleeds into night fall

**Author's Note:**

> i would like to say that i am very, very sorry. enjoy, i guess? if that's possible?
> 
> major death TW.

Peter and Tony had been getting close. Tony had been telling himself that it was better to keep the kid nearby so he could keep an eye on him, but now, he had to admit he was sort of getting… attached. He didn’t mean to, of course, but the once a week lab days and the once every six weeks compound weekends slowly grew into twice a week lab days and every other weekend at the compound.

And Tony couldn’t say he was mad about it. He looked forward to 3:30pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays when a certain superpowered teenager rushed into his lab, and towards 6pm every other Friday when Happy would drop the kid off at the front door of the compound. Towards the… end, Tony had started picking Peter up from his school directly, relishing the extra hour and a half in the car with the kid.

  
They would spend time in the lab together for hours. Music would be on far too loudly, Peter would do his homework, Tony would tinker, and once Peter was done they’d tinker together, on one of their suits or on Peter’s web shooters. At some point, they’d order dinner, and eat it in the lab, the conversation light and pleasant and the atmosphere perfect. Then Peter would head out for patrol, and Tony would be left alone in the lab that seemed a little less perfect without Peter next to him in it, or they’d move to the compounds movie room and Peter would fall asleep tucked into Tony’s side halfway through whatever nerd movie the kid had insisted on that week.

Then it would repeat. Week after week. For almost an entire year, it was a routine more predictable than clockwork. And Tony, who had always hated routine, loved it more than anything.

He secretly relished the few times an almost entirely asleep Peter, after being carried up to his room, called him dad. He liked it - he liked being the kid’s father. Even if he wouldn’t actually think about the fact, even if he wouldn’t actually admit it to himself.

But of course, like all things in his life, it was far too good to last.

First, Bruce had shown up after three years of radio silence talking about magical space stones an oversized purple guy was trying to collect, whereupon he would kill half of the universe’s population.

Second, a giant spaceship descended over New York, and Peter had come swinging from his school trip to help, because of course he did.

Third, Peter had actually followed him on to the large doughnut spaceship, and they’d blasted off into outer space.

Finally, they’d run into the Idiots of the Galaxy, who’d almost blasted the kid’s brains out, before their - leader? resident dumbass? - had screwed up their plan to get the gauntlet off of the purple guy’s arm, and he’d vanished, leaving them to sit, waiting ducks on a random planet somewhere that was hopefully still in the same galaxy as Earth, but there was no way of knowing.

And then.

And then the guardians had faded out, one by one, and when he’d turned to look at Peter, the kid had slammed into his chest, clinging on for dear life.

Tony could still hear his words.

“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good.”

Tony had grabbed on to him, clinging on, hoping, praying, begging that it was just shock settling in over the kid and not what he thought it was. And then Peter’s body had turned to dust in his hands, and Peter’s last words had been an apology. For what? Tony had wanted to scream. It’s my fault this is happening.

It was his fault.

That was what echoed through his head as he and Nebula floated through deep space. The echo in his head as he took what he expected to be his last waking breaths. The echo in his head as

Steve ran up to help him down from the ship and he was too numb to be mad.

The kid was dead. It was his fault. He was never going to be able to live. How could he? How could he breathe without the kid?

The echo followed him. Peter was in his thoughts, on his mind, through everything. He locked himself in his lab, only to be coaxed out by Pepper. Slowly, slowly, he spent more time out of his lab and with the rest of them. Ever so slowly.

Ever so slowly, Peter wasn’t the only thing on his mind. He’d think about Pepper. He tried to track down May, eventually realizing she was gone with the rest of them.

When Pepper told him she was pregnant, that he was going to be a father, it hit him like a slap to the face.

He couldn’t be a father. He already had been, had already had his shot to be better than his own father, but the kid he was the father to had died in his arms a year ago on a red planet somewhere in the farthest reaches of the universe, and there hadn’t even been a body to bring home and bury.

  
He had locked himself in the lab. The days bled into the night, into one another, and he’d been in there for a week. When he exited, Pepper was waiting, and they talked. They talked, and talked, and then they bought the house by the lake, a house much too big for their new, small family of three, a house with 5 bedrooms. When they had looked at it, he had turned to Pepper.  
“Pep, look, it’s the perfect size. A bedroom for you and me, a bedroom for the baby, a bedroom for Peter, and two guest rooms” before he had suddenly realized who he thought one of the bedrooms was going to be for, before he remembered the kid who he wanted to have a bedroom of his own in the new house was long gone, dead by a titan who too was long gone.

Pepper had nodded, and hadn’t mentioned it. They moved in the next week. The room across from the new baby, diagonal from him and Pepper, was done in the same style the room Peter Parker used to sleep in at the compound had been done, three years ago. They’d even brought some of the posters from his room there, and some of his more beloved items from his room at May’s, while the rest went into storage.

  
Pepper didn’t say anything, just let him create this room for the ghost of a kid who wasn’t even his.

  
When Morgan was born, what should have been the happiest day of his life, all he could think about was how much Peter would have loved to meet her.


	2. you're not here to get me through it all

The last thing Peter remembered - and he means really, properly remembered, not the strange blurs he remembers from the battle - was looking at an orange sky and feeling his body tear apart, trying every second to mend itself, but ultimately failing, and thinking, “this is where I die.”

  
And he was right. He came back, of course, which was a little weird. But who was he to complain? He came back from the dead. That’s a fun story for when he works through the trauma of having your body disintegrate and remembering every moment of it until you are completely gone.

The first thing he fully remembers after that moment is the moment Tony snapped.

It was very climactic, and far too fast. He’d watched in both shock and horror.

It happened far too quickly. Of course, that’s just how death is, isn’t it? The person is there, and then they aren’t. Just like that. In an instant.

It was still too fast, even knowing that’s just how death just is.

Watching the light on Tony’s chest go out got added to his list of “most traumatic experiences” - tied with watching Ben die in first place, right before actually dying, which was right before getting a building dropped on him.

Soon after that, he’d met Morgan. That was simultaneously a happy moment and one of the saddest in his life - she looked exactly like Tony, if he was a five year old girl.

She attached to him like a baby duck. Tony had apparently spent her formative years telling her stories about him, so she already knew who he was. He loved her - so much. She was young. Untainted. He loved her, and he was going to protect her.

He and May moved into the lake house the day before the funeral.

He had known Tony had given him a room. He hadn’t realized just how perfect the room was for him - how well Tony had to have known him, to have made a room so perfect for him.

The funeral was one of the hardest days of his life, tied with Ben’s funeral on his “hardest days of my life” list. There had been so many people, people he hadn’t met, people who he’d only met once.

Happy was there - it was the first time he’d seen the man since before the orange sky, and his eyes were red and puffy, face tear stained. Peter hadn’t looked in a mirror, but he was sure he looked similar - everyone did.

Peter spent most of the day with May, Pepper, and Morgan. He had been the same age as Morgan when his parents had died, and from what he could remember, he hadn’t been sad. Just confused why everyone was crying, why his mom couldn’t read him a story and why dad couldn’t walk him to school.

He’d rather have had that be him, would rather not know what was happening than know, and having to feel it.

But he was 16 (22?), and had far too many experiences with death to be confused on its nature.

He didn’t know where Tony was. Just that he was gone, that he wasn’t coming back.

Morgan still didn’t know that.

It made her both easy and hard to be around. He was jealous of her ignorance, jealous of her youth. Sad that she’d grow up without Tony Stark, sad that she would grow up without a dad.

At the same time, she was the only speck of joy in a room of mourners, and she didn’t watch what she was saying. She was refreshing. Everyone else was stifling, in their grief, in their ways of watching their words to avoid upsetting him.

In the days after the funeral, he and May settled into the lake house. He played with Morgan, he ate much less than he should have, and he stared at his ceiling all night as he tried to sleep. It became a pattern.

Sometimes they would all watch a movie, and he’d be tucked between Pepper and May, Morgan half on his lap, and he’d be drifting off to sleep for the first time in days, and he’d think, just for a second, that he was tucked under Tony’s arm. But he wasn’t, and Tony was dead, and he was pretty sure he was staring at an orange sky once again, and he’d be startled back awake.

His psychiatrist and his therapist, the ones Pepper had insisted on him getting, said that this was normal. That he was at the depression phase in his grief, and that depression, especially in grief, especially in trauma related to a person blacking out (dying, in his case,) caused lack of sleep in many people. The psychiatrist had prescribed him pills, one to sleep and one to keep the depression at bay, but Peter never took them.

He told himself it was because the psychiatrist was bullshit anyways - he wasn’t at his “depressed stage” in the five stages of grief, he’d never been in the others. He was just depressed, and if the psychiatrist didn’t realize that, then why should he take the meds?

It didn’t make any sense, in all actuality, but it was better than admitting that whenever he drifted off, he felt like he was on the orange planet once again. It was better than admitting that he didn’t know who he was outside of his constant thoughts, and he was worried that the meds would take them away.

He knew he should take them. Using the brain his therapist was working on building with him, he knew that if he got used to sleeping, got used to the way the meds made him feel, he would realize that he wasn’t back under the orange sky. He was in his blue bedroom.

But Tony was gone, and he was alive, and his failure to remove the gauntlet from the titan on the orange planet loomed in his mind perpetually.  
He wasn’t sure who he was anymore, not without those thoughts looming over him. They were constant, and they were him. And he couldn’t take his medication.

And Tony was gone.

Peter could remember the year leading up to the snap, the year after his homecoming. He and Tony had hung out a lot - twice a week in the lab at the tower, every other weekend at the compound.

They had been close. Peter was almost sure that Tony loved him, just based on the fact that the man had his school schedule and orders from all the restaurants they ordered from memorized, and how Tony had never moved when Peter had fallen asleep on his shoulder during movies.

Tony had been a constant - lab days on certain days of the week, and always in the medbay with him when he got stitches for whatever stab wound he stumbled in with on any given night.

Always there for a phone call at three A.M., always there to check on him when he was down.

But Tony was gone, dead, far away in wherever good people went when they died.

He wished Tony had been able to see him in this room made when he was a ghost, with the daughter Tony had always told about him, in the house that was far too big for a family of three.

He wished Tony was there to get him through this, to get him to go to sleep, to get him through the long nights that bled into the equally dark days.

But Tony Stark was gone. And Peter Parker was, by curse or by miracle, still alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really am sorry. I hope that this pain brings you some sort of joy? I hope you enjoyed, at least. Feel free to yell at me in the comments or on my tumblr, @galactic-cam


End file.
